Editor's Corner

So much to do, so little time! Here is another excerpt from Grammar Girl’s newest book: Grammar Girl’s 101 Troublesome Words You’ll Master in No Time.

Making Abbreviations Plural: RBIs

Acronyms are abbreviations that are pronounced as words (NASA), and initialisms are abbreviations for which you say each letter (FBI).

Even though it doesn’t make perfect sense, you make initialisms and acronyms plural by adding an s to the end no matter what part would be plural if you wrote out the whole thing. Therefore, even though you would write runs batted in, the plural is RBIs.

In the past, some publications used apostrophes to make acronyms and initialisms plural, so until a few years ago, it was common to see something like RBI’s or CD’s in The New York Times. But these days, the major style guides recommend omitting the apostrophe.

[KC – We do the same here in our documentation at Symitar—at least the items that come through our editing queue. You may notice that PCs, VPNs, IDs, and other
acronyms do not contain apostrophes after we’ve had our way with them. Occasionally, we may make an exception if the apostrophe adds clarity.]

A few weeks ago when I wrote about the different spellings of blond (blond♂and blonde ♀), someone asked about the word grey—or is it gray?

This is another one of those words where the primary difference in the spelling is where you live. The preferred American spelling is gray with an “a.” The rest of the English-speaking world tends to use grey with an “e.” In our Symitar documentation, we go with the rest of America and use gray, unless of course we’re writing about greyhounds (and you know that happens all the time in technical writing).

Here’s a little bit of history from Wikipedia and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

The first recorded use of grey as a color name in the English language was in AD 700. Grey is the British, Canadian, Australian, Irish, New Zealand and South African spelling, although gray remained in common usage in the UK until the second half of the 20th century. Gray is the preferred American spelling, although grey is an accepted variant. Gray became the preferred spelling in American English around 1825.

Have a super weekend!

Kara

Greyhound puppies from CutePuppyWorld.com

Here are the selections from earlier and the number of people who selected each answer. The total number follows, along with the original questions and a photo for your amusement.

1) EBE – 0

2) CBB – 38

3) EAD – 1

4) CBA – 14

5) CAB – 18

Total number of responses: 71

Questions:

1. In the sentence "The pig ate her corndog," the underlined pronoun has which of the following combinations of person, number, and case:

C. third person, singular, possessive

2. In the sentence "Each of the elephants have a pedigree," the verb agreement is which of the following:

B. Incorrect

3. What punctuation does the following example require? "He has carefully fixed all of the dents moreover, he has replaced and polished all of the chrome."

B. A semicolon after "dents"

From www.englishfailblog.com, a major failure from the bakery:

It’s quiz day! If you’re getting this via Outlook, use the voting buttons above to select the correct answer. If you’re reading this on the website, you’ll just have to write down your answer and check in later. I will send the correct answers this afternoon around 1:00 p.m. Have fun!

1.  In the sentence “The pig ate her corndog,” the underlined pronoun has which of the following combinations of person, number, and case:

• A. third person, plural, possessive
• B. third person, plural, accusative
• C. third person, singular, possessive
• D. third person, plural, subjective
• E. none of the above

2. In the sentence “Each of the elephants have a pedigree,” the verb agreement is which of the following:

• A. Correct
• B. Incorrect

3. What punctuation does the following example require? “He has carefully fixed all of the dents moreover, he has replaced and polished all of the chrome.”

• A. A comma after “dents”
• B. A semicolon after “dents”
• C. A period after “dents”
• D. A colon after “dents”
• E. None

This made me laugh, and it’s short but sweet. Today’s item is from the new book Grammar Girl’s 101 Troublesome Words You’ll Master in No Time.

No Such Thing as a Kudo

What’s the Trouble? Some people mistakenly believe that kudos is plural.

Kudos means “praise” or “glory” and is often used where congratulations would fit. It comes directly from Greek and is singular, just as praise and glory are singular. However, because kudos ends in s and congratulations is plural, some people mistakenly believe that kudos is plural and use kudo as a singular form. Such use is incorrect.

What Should You Do? Use kudos, and remember that it’s singular.

By request, today’s tidbit is about backward/backwards and toward/towards. The explanation is from www.quickanddirtytips.com, courtesy of Grammar Girl:

Most references say that, like “towards,” “backwards” is standard in Britain and “backward” is standard in America. The exception is that when you are using “backward” as an adjective, as in “her grandmother’s backward ways” or “the program has backward compatibility,” then you never use the “s.” It is always “backward” as an adjective.

If you are in the U.S., you have it easier because you can just remember that it’s always “backward” without the “s.” We like shortcuts here, such as eating dinner in our cars, so you can remember that we’ve lopped off the “s.” But if you are using British English, you have to remember that it’s “backwards” as an adverb and “backward” as an adjective.

For information on further and farther, see previous postings of Editor’s Corner: https://episystechpubs.wordpress.com/. For forward/forwards/foreword, see the “F” section in Common Errors in English Usage at: http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html.

Today I give you the last five symbols from the article “12 Signs and Symbols You Should Know” (on DailyWritingTipscom). I hope you enjoyed your weekend!

# (Number or Pound Sign, or Hash)

This symbol evolved from the abbreviation for pound, lb. (a literal abbreviation for the Roman word libra, meaning “balance”), in which horizontal lines were superimposed on the vertical lines of the letters, producing something like the tic-tac-toe pattern used today. One of many other names for the sign, octotherp (also spelled octothorp or otherwise), was a jocular coinage by telecommunications engineers in the mid-twentieth century. The symbol is seldom used outside informal or highly technical or otherwise specialized contexts. [KC – Okay, folks. This is the most wishy-washy, flip-floppy definition I’ve seen in a long time! “It’s spelled like
this—except when it isn’t spelled that way.” Yikes!]

% (Percent)

The sign for indicating percentage developed in the Middle Ages over the course of hundreds of years, beginning as an abbreviation of percent (from the Latin phrase per centum, meaning “out of a hundred”). Its use is recommended only in technical contexts or in tabular material, where space is at a premium. (Some standards authorities call for a space between a number and this symbol, but most publications and publishers omit the space.)

~ (Tilde)

The tilde is used as a diacritical mark over various letters to indicate a variety of sounds in different languages, but it also appears midline, like a dash (and is sometimes called a swung dash), to denote “approximately” (“Last night’s attendance: ~100”). It has technical connotations as well and is even used as a notation for recording sequences of action in juggling. The name, borrowed into English through Portuguese and Spanish from Latin, means “title.”

/ (Slash, Solidus, Stroke, or Virgule)

During the Middle Ages, this sign of many names, including those listed above, served as a comma; a pair denoted a dash. The double slash was eventually tipped horizontally to become an equal sign and later a dash or hyphen. (The equal sign is still used as a proofreader’s mark to indicate insertion of a hyphen.) The slash — also called the forward slash to distinguish it from the backslash, which is used only in technical contexts — is an informal substitute for or. [KC – In poetry, when writing lines without formatting, a single slash indicates the end of a line; the double slash indicates the end of a stanza.]

_ (Underscore or Understrike)

This artifact from the era of the typewriter was used on such devices to underline words to indicate emphasis in lieu of italics. [KC – Emphasis mine. If you are using underlines for emphasis in this day and age, and you send me work to edit, I will remove them. This is a huge pet peeve of mine, since we do not want to look like a technology company that promotes the uses of typewriters or other “artifacts.” Off soapbox.] As a survival of that function, words are sometimes bracketed by a pair of single underscores in email and other computer contexts to mark a word for emphasis (“That band totally _rocked_ the place.”). Indeed, as I typed this post in Microsoft Word, the program automatically converted rocked to italics. The symbol also appears frequently in email and website addresses and other technical contexts.

Before we start with today’s symbols in writing, I’d like to impart some not-so-grammarly information. I had several people ask me how to make the “cent” symbol yesterday, and like magic, Javier Romero sent me the answer! He suggested I pass on the information, and I think that’s a brilliant idea. Really, all you have to do is search Google for “alt codes” and you get tons of information. To save you time, I’ve previewed some of the sites and selected these three for various reasons. I’m sure there are prettier ones out there, but time is of the essence.

· http://www.wikihow.com/Type-Symbols-Using-the-ALT-Key Provides instructions on how to create symbols using a desktop PC, laptop, or Mac; also provides a list of symbols and the associated alt code.

· http://www.altcodes.org/ Provides categorized lists of codes (e.g., alphabet, bullet, and trademark symbols), a “how to” section, and additional information on alt codes.

· http://usefulshortcuts.com/downloads/ALT-Codes Links to categorized lists and a quick-reference guide/list of codes.

Now for the next three symbols, from Daily Writing Tips (www.dailywritingtips.com):

5. ° (Degree Sign)

The sign for degrees of arc or degrees of temperature, which started out as a superscripted zero, was chosen for consistency with use of the minute (′) and second marks (″) employed in geometry and geography; those symbols originally stood for the Latin numerals I and II. The degree sign appears in technical contexts, but in general-interest publications, the word degree is generally used.

In references to temperature, the symbol (and the designation of the temperature scale) immediately follows the associated numerical figure (“45°C”). This style is true of many publishing companies, though the US Government and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures prescribe a space between the number and the symbol (“45 °C”), while other publications omit the first letter space but insert another between the symbol and the abbreviation (“45° C”).

” (Ditto Sign)

The ditto sign, first attested three thousand years ago, signals that text shown above is to be repeated, as in a list in which the same quantity of various materials is intended to be expressed:

Apples 24
bananas "
oranges "

The word ditto, meaning “said,” derives from the Tuscan language, the immediate ancestor of Italian, but was borrowed into English hundreds of years ago. The word, its abbreviation (do.), and the symbol are considered inappropriate for most writing, though the term has often been used in informal spoken and written language to mean “(the same as) what he/she said.” Although the symbol has a distinct character code for online writing, straight or curly close quotation marks are usually employed to produce it.

$ (Dollar Sign)

This symbol for the American dollar and many other currencies was first used to refer to the peso, which inspired the American currency system. Various origin stories for the symbol come in and out of fashion, but it’s most likely that it developed from an abbreviation of pesos in which the initial p preceded a superscript s; the tail of the initial was often superimposed on the s. A dollar sign with two vertical lines is a less common variant.

Most books and other formal publications tend to spell out dollars in association with a (spelled-out or numerical) figure, but periodicals usually use the symbol, as do specialized books about finance or business or others with frequent references to money. In international publications, when the symbol is used, for clarity, it is combined with the abbreviation US (“US$1.5 million” or “US $1.5 million”).

The dollar sign is also used as an abbreviated reference to various functions in computer programming and similar contexts.

Have a great weekend everyone!

While I’m pretty sure everyone is familiar with the symbols on the standard (American) keyboard, this article from Daily Writing Tips (www.dailywritingtips.com) also provides a little history and usage information for twelve of the most common signs. Today we’ll have a look at the first four.

Note: This article contains some awkward phrasing, non-Chicago Manual of Style punctuation choices, and references to a swear word. I have not made corrections because I didn’t want to interrupt the text too many times with [sic]; my apologies to eagle-eyed readers and sticklers.

& (Ampersand)

The ampersand was, at least until well into the nineteenth century, treated as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet, but its star has fallen, so that now it is used only informally except in registered names of businesses (“Ay, Bee & See Inc.”), which should be written as rendered; a comma preceding it is extraneous. [KC – Woe to the serial comma.]

The symbol comes from the cursive formation of the Latin word et (“and”), and the name is a slurring contraction of “and per se and,” which used to terminate schoolroom recitals of the alphabet: The phrase means “and by itself and”; instead of reciting, “. . . W, X, Y, Z, and,” children said, “. . . W, X, Y, Z, and per se and” to clarify that “and” referred to a list item rather than serving as a conjunction for an item that was left unuttered. The symbol is also seen in &c. (“et cetera”), an alternate form of etc. [KC – Boy, that ending would certainly take the “oomph” out of the alphabet song.]

American Psychological Association (APA) style allows the ampersand to link author names in an in-text citation (“Laurel & Hardy, 1921”), but other style guides call for using the word and.

[KC – One of our YellowHammer coworkers, Valerie Manning, sent me an article about the ampersand, and this link shows you how the symbol emerged from “et.” Thanks,
Valerie! http://www.adobe.com/type/topics/theampersand.html]

* (Asterisk)

The asterisk is used to call out a footnote or to refer to an annotation of special terms or conditions, to substitute for letters in profanity (“Oh, s***!”) or a name rendered anonymous (“the subject, M***”), to serve as a low-tech alternative to a typographical bullet, or provide emphasis in place of boldface (“Do *not* go there — the food is awful.”). It also has many specialized technical usages. Its name is derived from the Greek term asteriskos, meaning “little star,” and it was originally applied to distinguish date of birth from other references to years.

@ (At Sign)

Until the age of e-mail, the at sign was restricted mostly to commercial use, in purchase orders and the like, to mean “at the rate of” (“Order 1K widgets @ $2.50 per.”). It’s also used in displays of schedules for competitive sports to identify the event venue. Now it’s ubiquitous in email addresses and in social-networking usage, as well as computer protocols, but outside of those contexts, it is considered inappropriate for all but the most informal writing.

¢ (Cent)

This symbol for cent (from the Latin word centum, meaning “hundred”), unlike its cousin the dollar sign — it’s also used in many monetary systems other than that of US currency — is rare except in informal usage or for price tags. When it does appear, unlike the dollar sign, it follows rather than precedes the numeral, though as in the case of the dollar sign, no space intervenes. The equivalent usage in a context where dollar signs are employed is to treat the amount as a decimal portion of a dollar (“$0.99”); for clarity, a zero should always be inserted between the dollar sign and the decimal point.

The sign probably originated to distinguish an ordinary c from one denoting a monetary amount.

Today’s Editor’s Corner is borrowed from the Grammar Girl web site (quickanddirtytips.com). I was looking for something related to the 4th of July, but the grammar world comes up short on patriotic “rules and regulations.” Then I saw this sad news about Car Talk. While I lament that I won’t be getting weekly lessons on cars (while practicing my Boston accent), here’s the article on nicknames, just for kicks.

Are Nicknames Capitalized?

by Mignon Fogarty

Tom and Ray Magliozzi just announced that in September they’ll stop producing new episodes for their popular NPR show Car Talk. Tom and Ray also go by Click and Clack.

Capitalize Nicknames

"Click" and "Clack" are capitalized because they’re nicknames—they take the place of a real name. You might say to your brother, “Boy, I’d sure like to meet Tom and Ray,” or you might say, “I’d sure like to meet Click and Clack.” The nicknames are essentially interchangeable with the real names.

Don’t Capitalize Terms of Endearment

Nicknames are different from terms of endearment, however. Terms of endearment aren’t capitalized. For example, let’s say you call your husband "honey." You might walk in the door and say “Honey, I’m home,” but you wouldn’t call your sister and say, “When I got home, honey was already making dinner. What a guy!”

A term of endearment isn’t interchangeable with a name the same way a nickname is, and terms of endearment aren’t capitalized.